to the Welsh or Tobacco period, when the
currency was easily transferable, but liable to deterioration.

v. Finally, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the
world of labour attained to a cash basis, and there was no
Cobbett to denounce the resumption.

We shall not be guilty of serious exaggeration if we preface our history
with the motto:

'_In the nineteenth century the Trade Unions and the Trade Unions alone
made the nominal earnings of the working man a cash reality_.'

3. THE SPIRIT OF ASSOCIATION

1. The student of Dicey's Law and Opinion in England is invited to
distinguish three periods:

i. The period of old Toryism or legislative quiescence (1800-38).

ii. The period of Benthamism or individualism (1825-70).

iii. The period of collectivism (1865-1900).

Bentham lived during the first period and his name is rightly given to
the second period.

The student, therefore, comes to wonder if there is anything which is
not Benthamism. Benthamism, he says to himself, stands for
individualism. How then can the period of Benthamism include the
humanitarian legislation which begins with the first Factory Act of 1802
and broadens out during the middle of the century into the elaborate
code regulating from then onwards the conditions of employment in
workshops, factories, and mines? How can a monster beget an angel?

We may perhaps throw light on this difficulty by suggesting that the
_social_ trend from 1825-70 cannot be compressed into a single word.
Individualism may suffice to define the dominant _legal_ trend, but it
conceals the influence exerted on the legislature from without and from
below by the action of voluntary associations. The period of voluntary
association coincides with and overlaps the period of individualism.

2. What Bentham was to individualism, Robert Owen was to voluntary
association. Bentham himself was an admirer of Owen and supported his
philanthropy, but, as expressions of a social attitude, Benthamism and
Owenism were poles asunder. The contrast between the two is admirably
displayed in the evidence given before the Factory Committee of 1816 by
two representatives of the employing class, Josiah Wedgwood of pottery
fame and Robert Owen himself.

'In the state of society,' said Wedgwood, 'in which there is evidently a
progressive movement, it is much better to leave things as they are than
to attempt to amend the general state of